Prometheus Bound
The war on terror and the cautionary tale of adopted New Mexican J. Robert Oppenheimer.
I've been reading lately about a famous part-time New Mexican, atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who served his country as head of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos only to be shabbily treated by this nation during the Red Scare of the 1950s. American Prometheus, the groundbreaking biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, recently won a Pulitzer Prize and is now out in a thick paperback edition.
Oppenheimer's scientific career, of course, reached its zenith with the testing of the first atomic bomb near Alamogordo, right in our Southwest New Mexico backyard. Whatever you think of the subsequent use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 61 years ago this month—and Oppenheimer himself came to have second thoughts about the use of his creation, especially the second strike, on Nagasaki—he and his team of scientists believed their work was essential to ending the war. They rightly feared the awful consequences if Nazi Germany beat the US to the Bomb. The fact that the war in Europe ended before the Trinity test in July 1945 doesn't lessen the patriotic achievement of the scientists who labored at Los Alamos. (For more on the Manhattan Project, see "Quest for Fire" in the July 2005 Desert Exposure.)
Later, however, Robert Oppenheimer began to question the subsequent nuclear arms race and to point out the folly of the US and Soviet Union spending trillions on weapons capable of destroying each other many times over. He opposed the development of the H-bomb, far more powerful than the A-bomb tested at Alamogordo, and called for "candor" instead of secrecy about atomic weaponry.
This stance earned Oppenheimer powerful enemies, who used his pre-Cold War flirtation with Communism—though it's clear he was never a member of the Communist Party, not even when the Soviets were US allies—to destroy him. They enlisted the help of FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, who had been illegally wiretapping Oppenheimer's phone and home for years. Hoover even wiretapped Oppenheimer's conversations with lawyers, feeding this intelligence daily to prosecutors. Hearings in 1954—ostensibly to revoke his Atomic Energy Commission security clearance, but actually designed to smear his reputation—made Oppenheimer one of the most prominent victims of anti-Communist hysteria. Before Oppenheimer's death in 1967, however, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him with the Enrico Fermi Prize for scientific public service. It was a belated vindication for the "father of the atom bomb."
As I read about Oppenheimer's rise and fall, what struck me were the similarities between the Cold War of the 1950s and today's "war on terrorism." As early as 1949, Oppenheimer's friend, poet Archibald MacLeish, wrote an essay in The Atlantic Monthly entitled "The Conquest of America," in which MacLeish attacked the American response to the "Communist menace." As Bird and Sherwin summarize MacLeish's argument, "Although America was the most powerful nation on the globe, the American people seemed seized by a mad compulsion to define themselves by the Soviet threat. In this sense, MacLeish wryly concluded, America had been 'conquered' by the Soviets, who were now dictating American behavior. 'Whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse,' MacLeish wrote. He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism."
With the substitution of "Al Qaeda" and "anticommunism," that paragraph from American Prometheus could almost perfectly describe America in the first decade of the 21st century. In the wake of the tragic events of Sept. 11, five years ago next month, we have allowed ourselves to be defined by a small band of Islamic extremists. The terrorists of Al Qaeda have succeeded in altering American society and endangering the values passed down to by the Founding Fathers far more than in their wildest dreams.
Later in the book, Albert Einstein—Oppenheimer's colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ—is quoted about his fears of the rise of McCarthyism. In 1951, Einstein had written to his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, likening what he saw happening in America to the very Nazism he had fled years before: "The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil."
In the 21st-century version of this climate of fear, we have seen "leaks" at the highest levels damage the career of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, whose husband had the temerity to challenge the administration's war policy. We have been buffeted by one revelation after another about secret intrusions by the National Security Agency (NSA) into the lives of Americans—our phone records, our bank records. When the New York Times revealed the existence of one such NSA scheme, the editor responsible was branded a "traitor" by the White House's right-wing cheering section.
The NSA spying—that we now know about—may indeed be valuable in thwarting terrorists. But only by erring on the side of—to use Oppenheimer's word—candor, rather than secrecy, can the American public make that decision. Openness, democratic debate and freedom of the press—even (especially!) to print things that embarrass the powers that be—are the essence of the America that Al Qaeda has vowed to destroy. Let us not do their work for them.
The domestic spying that we do not yet know about may be far more troubling. Recently, the Times reported that Michigan Congressman Peter Hoekstra—a Republican, an ally of the administration and a supporter of its efforts to date in the war on terror—wrote a "sharply worded letter" to the president, charging that Congress had not been properly informed about still other, as yet undisclosed secret intelligence programs. That failure to inform Congress, Hoekstra warned, was possibly a violation of the law. The mind reels to think what spying practices might spark such concern from even an ardent backer of previous intrusions.
Rep. Hoekstra wrote, "The US Congress should not have to play 20 Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution." This, remember, from a Republican, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Another Republican on the committee, New Mexico Rep. Heather Wilson, told the Times, "I think the administration has been insufficiently forthcoming on a number of important programs. . . . There's a presumption that if they don't tell anybody, a problem may get better or it will solve itself."
From the excesses of the Patriot Act, which reached even into our nation's libraries, to domestic spying both revealed and still hidden even from Congress, to the justification of anything and everything as essential to the war on terror, the echoes of the Red Scare are real and troubling. Much as the US began to "Sovietize" in the 1950s in reaction to Communism, have we begun to "Al Qaeda-ize" our free society, adopting the worst traits and tactics of our enemy? They brandish the Koran; we wave the Bible. They forbid images of their Prophet; we seek to amend our Constitution to prohibit burning the flag.
Most of us remember J. Robert Oppenheimer for his role in the Manhattan Project, ushering in the atomic age here in the desert of southern New Mexico. Fewer recall his subsequent humiliation, how a great American was sacrificed on the altar of anticommunist conformity. Oppenheimer's only crime was naïveté—and perhaps too great a trust in the country he'd served so assiduously.
Maybe we need to keep in mind the rest of the story of this part-time New Mexican, as America once again struggles not to let our foes define us.
The recent film Good Night and Good Luck powerfully dramatized how CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow stood up to the Red-baiting bullying of Sen. Joe McCarthy. It is not her gender but rather her journalistic "chops" that make one despair of expecting much of the same from Murrow's latest successor, Katie Couric. At least the fear-filled 1950s had people like Murrow and Joseph Welch, who stood up to McCarthy as the US Army's attorney. Today we have journalists chiefly experienced at interviewing Britney Spears, and politicians whose closest claim to courage is having refused a bribe from lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
The dangers from terrorists are frighteningly real, just as the Communist threat in the previous century was not just a figment of Joe McCarthy's imagination. Along with the many innocents whose lives and careers were shattered, the "atomic spies" Julius and Ethel Rosenberg apparently were genuinely guilty. Similar archival revelations suggest that Alger Hiss was not merely the victim of Red-baiting that a generation of progressives grew up believing.
But the excesses of the Red Scare did not make America more safe from its genuine enemies, any more than the "mutually assured destruction" of the "Dr. Strangelove" H-bomb strategists whom Oppenheimer opposed made us more secure. Have our current sacrifices of civil liberties made today's America safer? Ironically, only last month the CIA formally disbanded the operation tasked with apprehending Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks—who remains at large, free to menace Americans here and in Iraq.
It's comforting to think that the American system is self-correcting, that after all McCarthyism was deflated after Welch famously scolded the Wisconsin senator, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Oppenheimer did return from the shadows to which he'd been unjustly banished, and was honored at the White House. But Richard Nixon, the most scurrilous Red-baiter after only McCarthy, went on to be elected to two terms as president (although his unscrupulous tactics ultimately caught up with Nixon, at least). Despite countless revelations about ways large and small that J. Edgar Hoover broke the law and besmirched the constitution he was sworn to uphold, the late FBI director's name today adorns the FBI's headquarters in Washington, DC.
In accepting the Fermi Prize, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, ". . .with countless other men and women, we are engaged in this great enterprise of our time, testing whether men can both preserve and enlarge life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and live without war as the great arbiter of history."
That testing continues today, nearly 40 years later. At this juncture in history, it would be hard to give us a passing grade.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.